Author and host of the hit OUTDOOR CHANNEL show SHOOTING GALLERY spouts off...

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Yesterday — That Kind of a Day

What kind of a day? The kind of day where you spend the whole day struggling against a collapsed Internet connection, then when you finally sit down to crack that adult beverage, you notice that the dog is happily eating your passport.

Sigh…

I had a bunch of voice work to not only do, but upload ASAP. So, of course, the Internet took the Big Sleep. I ended up using the hotspot on the phone, roughly 300 baud, to upload the audio. Slow, but I managed to get it ground out. I sort of had illusions that I'd start putting rounds through the Ruger GP-100 .44 Special (pictured above) later in the day, but it turned out to be just that…illusions. Maybe tomorrow.

I gotta say I'm not enamored with the great big grips on the .44 Special GP-100. Compare and contrast these with the rubber/wood insert grips on my Gemini Custom-tuned GP-100 Wiley Clapp .357. Here's a pix from my friend Jeff Quinn at GunBlast:

I had some various stems and seeds left over from SHOT 2017. I was excited the see that ALG Defense, the sister company to Geiselle Automatics, was offering a Galil trigger. The one they had at SHOT was super-deluxe, so I talked to the guys and, hopefully my Galil will be headed off to serve as their crash test dummy as well as get a slick trigger. Here's a link from The Firearm Blog…the ALG site seems to be down.

I found the perfect-sized messenger bag from 5.11 to hold the most recent QC10/Dead Foot pistol project. I'm hoping it gets here in time for our SHOOTING GALLERY filming. Makes for a natty package. BTW, I paid MSRP, and rush shipping. Not crazy about multicam, but it is what it is. I woulda gone blue Kryptek.

I'm convinced Tony Galazan, the founder of Connecticut Shotgun is a true demented genius. The CT Shotgun gun room is a wonderful slice of England in New Britain, and his top-end shotguns — yours for a nice 6-figure price tag — are absolutely beautiful. With 4 acres of world-class machining capability under the roof, Tony decides to build a jewel-like 3/4 scale Thompson in .22 LR. Then he invents the bullpup double-barreled pump shotgun, the DP-12, which won the coveted Golden Bullseye design Award for the top shotgun of the year. My DP-12 is now my go-to shotgun, with a tube of #00 buckshot and a tube of police slugs; pull the trigger twice, and you get one from Column A and one from Column B.

No sense letting his machines and craftsmen sit idle, so he starts manufacturings ARs and, in his spare time, designs a semiauto box magazine-fed shotgun, the SP-12, which will come to market this year (3-Gunners, begin hyperventilation). There a bullpup version of that shotgun somewhere in the back rooms in Connecticut. And a more traditional tactical pump action...

Hmmmmm..what to do, what to do next…

Building the perfect Single Action Army revolver has sent more than one manufacturer to an early grave, so Tony says,"Of course!" SAAs were designed when handwork was cheap and machines were expensive, and their creation assumes meticulous machining and assembly. The result, as shown at Media Day, were pretty incredible (we'll have video on SOG) — precise metal work, crisp actions and finishing on par with his high-end shotguns. How about making the grips from the leftover wood from his high-end shotgun stocks? Oh, and available with his own spectacular color case-hardening and engraved. And hey, as long as he's building Single Action Armys, why not add a 1911 to the mix? With color case-harened options, and engraving? For $1300?

So what next? Of course! What anybody would do next…a pink 6-barrel .25 ACP "volley gun" that fires 2 shots at a time! Also available in OD Green. And bright SHOOTING GALLERY yellow.

To me, Tony Galazan is what's great about the firearms industry, a man not only with a vision, but with a restless curiosity and the amazing talent (and the configurable factory) to turn visions into reality. How neat is that?

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I agree with you that Tony Galazan at Connecticut Shotguns is a genius. In fact, I believe that he is the "Henry Ford" of the gun manufacturing world. He may not be "inventing guns", but he certainly is perfecting many of them and making them affordable to the masses. Further, he has surrounded himself with like-mind "Masters-of-Machining" and is able to turn out guns that offer tremendous novelty, value, function and utility, no matter how much they cost. And as Henry Ford was able to perfect an affordable V-8, the venerable "Flat-Head", so too has Galazan been able to perfect affordable highly-featured guns of all types. The best example is his new company arm, Standard Manufacturing, who is making ultra-affordable ARs. That got my attention.